Re: Rapid Shift to Renewables (Letters, Friday, June 23, 2017)
The letter written by Coady Simpson was excellent. As the earth continues to spin, our hunger for oil and its by-products continues to grow also. I know why – money. Big money. It’s not that the stuff is good for us, or the air we breathe, or the rivers, creeks and streams it eventually ends up in. Yes, we need it. But do we?
Technological advances should have eliminated the reliance of fossil fuels by now. Apparently, the US put a man on the moon nearly 50 years ago, wow. Surely we’ve come far enough to slow our reliance on fossil fuels, no? Other countries are way ahead of Canada and the US in terms of renewables, mostly European countries.
The technology industry that exists today is coming along regarding renewable energy resources. It is far past time we see shifts in big oil investments to renewable energy sources such as wind turbines, solar energy, and ocean action (tide rise and fall) which occurs twice daily and should be harvested. All of these sources will have minimal impact on anything after initial construction. Hydrogen fuel cells? The list goes on. These hopefully future energy sources have very little impact on our environment and the air and water around us in which we can’t survive without.
So why, Mark Strahl, are you not pushing Ottawa for more renewable energy resources? By the way, I did not vote for you.
Electric cars and pick-ups are hopefully not far away – lots of them, some are here now. As we slowly poison our planet with the fossil fuels we burn, it makes me wonder will humanity be around in 100, 500, or 5,000 years – as this is merely a blink in the eyes of time. Accelerated, human-caused climate change is here to stay and we need to act now. It may already be too late for the future next-of-kin as they will have to deal with what we left them, thanks a lot people of the twentieth, and twenty-first century. If we can change our state of mind that oil is everything, the people that work in the oil industry could likely be employed in the renewable energy sector when the time comes, hopefully soon.
But there are the nay-sayers, that meaning Global Warming/Climate Change doesn’t exist because of man. For you non-believers, I suggest the next time your power goes out, you run a flex pipe (three or four inch will do) from the tail pipe of your car or truck, when it is running, into your house for heat. You will be nice and toasty, and dead.
China has a sunrise and a sunset, albeit hard to see through the man-made smog, as this is caused by the burning of coal and about a billion automobiles. Nearly all gas, diesel, and propane engines produce poisonous exhaust gasses, so you cannot deny the facts or the science that combustion engines (trucks, semis, cars, boats, weed-whackers, golf carts, planes, jets, power saws, ocean liners, barges, leaf blowers, etc.) all produce these gasses. Again, the nay-sayers that do not believe this to be true either have rocks in their heads, or shares in oil, or both. Suck in some of that fresh, clean tailpipe air – you’ll love it.
The Earth’s surface and atmosphere have magnificent capabilities of correcting and absorbing our mistakes but there is a tipping point. We treat this home of ours (Earth) so poorly and give nothing back. We cannot survive without this planet, but this planet will thrive without us. Why do we treat our home this way with no thought of the future of humanity, only the thought of money?
Scott Manweiler
Rosedale, BC